Flesh-&-Bone(16)

Benny stared ahead, and for a few moments he did not actually see a thing except shadows drifting across the front of his mind.

“Yeah,” he said very quietly, “crazy, huh?”

Nix hugged Eve and kissed her hair. Then she encouraged her to drink from a canteen. Finally Nix caught Benny’s eye and gave him a tiny nod.

Benny and Chong came over, but they did not sit too close, warned off by a quick flare of Nix’s eyes. Benny sat cross-legged next to Chong and waited as Eve looked shyly at them from within the protection of Nix’s arms.

“Eve—?” began Nix softly.

“Mmm?” Eve answered in a tiny voice.

“Do you live around here?”

Eve sniffed and shook her head. “They chased us and . . . we had to run away.”

Ouch, thought Benny.

“Who did you run away with?” asked Nix. No need to ask who they ran from.

“Mommy and Daddy and Ry-Ry and me, we had to run away ’cause the angels came and set fire to the trees, and then the gray people came through the fence and ate all the sheep and cows and tried to eat—” She suddenly stopped and looked around, her eyes filling with new tears. “Where’s my mommy?”

“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, it’s all right,” soothed Nix, “we’ll find her.”

Benny marveled at Nix’s patience. As sympathetic as he was to Eve, he could not stand the tears, the crying, the panic that emanated from the girl. It made him want to scream and run and hit things. Dead things. Or . . . anything. Trees, a rock wall. His fists were balled tight, and his whole body remained rigid as he tensed against a possible new wave of weeping.

“Sweetie,” said Nix to Eve, “where was your mommy when you last saw her?”

Eve’s face went blank as she thought about it. She glanced over Nix’s shoulder to the slope that rose above the jagged mouth of the ravine, then turned and scanned the entire terrain. “I was playing in the creek,” she said. “Mommy was doing the washing. And Ry-Ry was making breakfast and—”

Benny nodded. He leaned forward and said, “Eve . . . does your mom have black hair?”

Eve blinked at him like a confused turtle. “No. Mommy has yellow hair.” She said it as if everyone knew that.

Chong bent close and whispered, “Why’d you ask that?”

Benny shrugged. “Probably nothing. I thought I saw a woman in the woods right before the zoms started chasing me.”

“Was she—?” began Chong, and left the rest unsaid.

“I thought so,” Benny said, “but the zoms didn’t go for her.”

“Cadaverine?” suggested Chong.

“Maybe. I don’t know, it was all so fast.”

Chong nodded sadly. They both remembered Tom’s admonition about strangers. “A newly reanimated zom hasn’t had time to rot, so they’ll look like a living person right up to when they take a bite out of you.”

“Where was your camp?” Nix asked the little girl.

“I don’t know. When the gray people tried to get me, I ran and ran. We have to find Mommy and Daddy and Ry-Ry.”

“Who’s Ry-Ry?”

“A girl,” Eve said, as if that was obvious to anyone. “She was taking us to a new home where we could all be safe from the gray people and the angels.”

Lilah abruptly stood. “I’ll find them,” she said, and stalked off to begin preparing her gear for a hunt.

“Where’s the spear lady going?” asked Eve.

“She’s a very good hunter,” said Nix. “She’ll find your mommy and the others.”

“What about the gray people?” Eve asked in horror. “They’ll get her!”

Nix smiled. “No, honey. They gray people won’t get Lilah. She’s smart and really strong, and she’s quieted a lot of them.”

“Quieted?”

“Put them to sleep.”

“Pretend sleep or forever sleep?”

“Um . . . forever sleep,” Nix assured her.

Chong leaned close to Benny again. “This is fascinating,” he said quietly. “If there are other settlements out here, then they’re probably like islands or distant countries used to be in the days before the world was mapped. So isolated that their own phrasing and references—all the slang and jargon that we’ve used since First Night—is going to be different.”